The Resurgence of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"

Photo illustration by Hamish Robertson. Leonard Cohen photograph by Rama.Mickey Mouse Club co-star; k.d. lang, alone on a podium in all white, crooned the track during the Olympic Games’ Canada-saluting opening ceremonies; and the American Idol producers scored a montage of this season’s finalists celebrating their triumphs to Jeff Buckley’s cover, which appeared on his 1994 album, Grace.

This isn’t the first time that Cohen’s song—or, rather, others’ interpretations of it—has seemingly blanketed the airwaves. In 2007, music writer Mike Barthel wrote an analysis of the song’s popularity with music supervisors, particularly in situations where sincerity was a prerequisite. Barthel notes that, in the early 2000s, ex–Velvet Underground member John Cale’s take appeared alongside Smash Mouth’s peppy “All Star” on the soundtrack to the animated-gnome film Shrek, after which the song took on a life of its own on TV; different versions of “Hallelujah” were employed as signifiers of serious business on youth-leaning shows like Scrubs and The O.C. (The latter utilized Buckley’s cover and one by quirky songbird Imogen Heap.)And there’s more: The rock band Fall Out Boy sprinkled the song’s chorus into their 2007 track “Hum Hallelujah”; FOB cohorts Paramore also integrated it into their live show (as a way of introducing their own track with the same name). “Hallelujah” got what was arguably its biggest Stateside exposure in the spring of 2008, when the dreadlocked American Idol hopeful Jason Castro meticulously covered the Buckley/Cale interpretation on the televised talent show—causing Buckley’s version to soar to No. 1 on the U.S. Digital Tracks chart.

Idol’s cantankerous Simon Cowell took note of this success, subsequently declaring Buckley’s take “one of [his] favorite songs of all time” and lining up the rights for “Halleljuah” to be used as the “coronation song” for the winner of his British talent show The X Factor later that year. (That version went to No. 1 on the U.K. singles charts and helped Buckley’s cover vault back into the top five.)

Shows like Idol and The X Factor place a premium on a singer’s ability to “connect” with a song, and “Hallelujah” definitely has lots of places where a singer can grab on. The song’s pre-Shrek history—written by the serious troubadour Cohen, covered by the underground-rock pioneer Cale, and remade once again by the gone-before-his-time Buckley—implies a place in the firmament just as much as the lyrics, which meld together the sacred and the profane in different ways depending on what verses are employed. (Cohen apparently wrote about 80.)

Watching performances of “Hallelujah” by people who aren’t Cohen—whose original take has an archness that’s wiped away by the clear-eyed sincerity offered up by his successors—you see one common thread: each singer really feels the song, closing their eyes at least once in every performance to properly communicate that what they are singing is Serious Business. This despite the cut-and-paste nature of the covers, some of which elide the song’s more disturbing imagery (“She tied you to her kitchen chair / She broke your throne and she cut your hair”) in an effort to expedite the journey to the song’s hymn-like, catharsis-providing chorus.

“‘Hallelujah,’” Barthel wrote in 2007, “offers all those great, resonant Biblical signifiers and intense religious emotions without the proselytizing or the attempt at a modern updating.” And it’s telling that the first major usage of the song in 2010 was in the context of an oustretched hand; proceeds from the studio version’s iTunes sales went to help victims of the January earthquake in Haiti. When Timberlake was asked why he took on Cohen for charity, he told MTV, “The way that it’s written can be interpreted many different ways. But the emotion that comes through—the chords, the melody, and also what’s being said in the song—it just kind of fit for the telethon.” (He, like Cowell, cited the track as one of his favorites, although it’s unclear whose version he prefers.)

Cohen himself seems somewhat bemused by the New Sincerity–boosted success of “Hallelujah,” which didn’t even rate a mention in his 1996 biography. Shortly after last year’s release of the comic-book adaptation Watchmen, which uses “Hallelujah” in a widely derided love scene, he told the CBC: “I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it and the reviewer said, ‘Can we please have a moratorium on “Hallelujah” in movies and television shows?’ And I kind of feel the same way.”

But singers who want to establish themselves as serious artists do not, and neither do consumers, which has at least given the people administering Cohen’s publishing rights something to herald. On the digital-songs charts released Wednsday, Buckley’s take on “Hallelujah” re-entered the fray at No. 147, selling 13,000 virtual copies, while lang’s version, included on her new greatest-hits compilation, Recollection, vaulted from No. 122 to No. 17, moving 71,000 units. A group called The Canadian Tenors is also currently charting with a melodramatic version of the song that makes Buckley’s take seem downright subdued.

Cohen’s original, however, did not sell the 10,000 copies required for it to break into the charts.